


By Their Proper Names

by webbedfeet



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical, M/M, Teutonic Knights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 14:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1350847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webbedfeet/pseuds/webbedfeet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cold War is over, the Wall has fallen, Prussia is dissolved and Gilbert expects to die eventually. Until then, what else is an ex-nation supposed to do while he's waiting for death? Go pester the neighbour, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Their Proper Names

On the day the Wall came down, Gilbert sauntered over to the shadow waiting beyond the crowd and smirked.

_See. I told you so._

Roderich only gave him a faint musician's smile before bowing once, as if this was one of the chess matches they had in Vienna back when Vienna was still a center of the world. He couldn't tell if he had any desire to just pull the brunette over and hug him as fiercely as he could, and in any case both of them turned on their heels and started walking down separate streets. Roddy, to the neutral vigil he vowed to keep forever, him to the waiting bear-hug his brother was all too willing to give.

Their footsteps didn't echo on the pavement. He couldn't tell if, at any point, Roderich had turned back to look at him. Roderich wouldn't be able to tell, either, that Gilbert glanced back once, before rounding the corner, to see his cloaked figure disappearing into the crowd.

He whistled Fritz's favorite song. It wasn't exactly 'in' at the moment, but damn if he was not to say anything to Fritz on the day he finally got himself back together again.

On the day they dismembered his state, Gilbert leaned back against the wall and watched the proceedings, quiet. Ludwig argued on his behalf, passionately and desperately, but he was old enough to know how these things went, and that was final. Such was the way these things were decided. He would prefer to die in battle, quickly and proudly, but there were things to be said about dying a long and boring death. Free time, for instance. He could go pester the entirety of Europe like never before. He could raise a whole new flock of birds. Maybe he'd even pick up some old clothes and become a street performer, showing those historical geeks how old swordfighting was _really_ done.

And there was the sound of a piano wafting down the street. Clumsy and amateurish, but a piano song nonetheless.

Gilbert hummed along with it. He later wrote a letter to Roderich, which he was sure was scrutinized over by at least seven different foreign organizations.

_Hey, have you heard? Apparently I'm finally gonna die._

_Of course I have. More importantly, has no one told you how to use proper written forms of speech?_

He wondered what song Roddy was playing when he wrote that letter. A celebratory march perhaps? If he was allowed a bit of wishful thinking, maybe even something a little sad? He had no idea what he wanted to think about Roddy and what he wanted Roddy to think about him, but he was the only person Gilbert consistently hated from the beginning and he couldn't help but think that he'd miss the musician if the latter suddenly disappeared off the map. Worse still, what if in his absence Gilbert had turned from 'archenemy' into 'annoying sideshow that means nothing'?

He wrote back to Roderich, this time in telegram : _I'll hate you forever, just so you know._

Roderich wrote back : _Really, don't you realize how outdated telegrams are these days?_

It's a wonderful thing, being hated. He didn't know how he could live without it.

Gilbert spent most of the following months pestering West and trying to make himself as annoying as possible, in as much as someone so awesome could be annoying. He bugged everybody who could be bugged, even Ludwig's dogs, and when he wasn't being a troll he sank himself into his old collection of diaries. If he was going to die, he'd at least take as many of his memories with him as he could.

And when he heard that 'Austria' was going to join the fledgling European Union, he rolled his eyes. Even if you made that man promise and swear by the name of seven Gods to stay neutral forever (not that there were seven Gods, he was just hypothetically speaking), you could trust Roderich to find loopholes in the argument. The bastard just couldn’t stay by himself for very long.

Him? Bah. He had West, and he had his birds. Still, he was also born alone and rose to power alone, bar a few convenient war allies here and there. It made sense that he'd fall alone, too.

'So how does it feel to play house with everyone you've shacked up with all those past years?' Gilbert said, showing off his new telephone lines.

'First, I did not marry _all_ of them. Second, do you know how much international calls cost?'

For a brief moment his thoughts ran to the memories of a boy who became a girl, and he shook his head. _She_ wouldn't fall with Roddy even if he disappeared, would she, for all the centuries they stayed together? Of course not. That whole stinking Union wouldn't, either. It was just a way of saying 'mind your own business and we'll mind ours' politely, in the end.

Nothing permanent. Treaties are like that.

'You can only hide behind paper words and excuses for so long, Roddy,' he remembered himself muttering. 'Sooner or later you'll let it slip that you didn't like any of them and never did.'

Immense hatred. It's the only thing that stays, really. Romance? You fall in and out of it as easily as underwear. Relationships? His own brother could be made to cut him off if the humans told him he had to. Hate? Now that was one thing that was his, one thing that lasted forever.

'At this rate it's going to take me forever to die, but for your information, I'm still hating you to the end of time and you suck,' he said, munching on some apfelstrudels Roderich had baked the afternoon he was hiding from all the fuss of the Y2K Scare.

Roderich just flicked him a _look_ and played a new song on his piano. 'New' being figurative, because Roddy was the only person he knew who could play the same songs over and over for more than six hundred years.

Maybe he was obsessive-compulsive. Maybe he had some pent-up sexual longing for Mozart. Freud was Austrian, wasn't he?

It was more comfortable, he admitted, to freeload off Roderich's place sometimes. He had to dodge that bastard frypan demon, sure, but even that was comforting---Elizaveta, too, seemed to have been using the same pan for a few centuries now. That thing probably belonged in a museum, like everything else in the small house, up to and including its master. He guessed that was why it felt more right than being at the house he shared with West. As old and tiresome as it was, nothing in Roderich's house seemed to have changed, not even after Vienna lost much of its old splendour. The philosophers and the scientists may have all migrated to Germany and left behind only tourists, but somehow it was as if by being here he could still feel the beating of a very old heart.

Before he knew it, he had his own toothbrush at the house, because it was a pain to remember to bring one every time and Roderich always complained about how his mouth stank if he forgot. A few years later and he had a few shirts hanging in the cellar. More years still and even Gilbird had his own spot in the rookery, too, next to the place where an old arrogant two-headed eagle used to live. It was still well-tended. The chick seemed to find it to his liking, even if it was built for a much larger bird who was no longer around.

'Just how long do you intend to continue this?' Roderich asked, one day, just as they were sitting together on the sofa and watching the newest reality show.

'Eh? Which part? The part where I hate you, or the part where I camp in your house?'

Roderich stared at him. Then he sighed and turned away.

Even that sort of change didn't bother him as much as it would have for anybody else. If Elizaveta did that, for instance, it would seriously creep him out, but Roderich? While Roderich now only settled for a sigh for transgressions that would've cause him to throw Gilbert out with the bathwater in the past centuries, that was all right, because nothing that mattered had really changed. They still hated each other as much as ever; the Austrian had just resigned himself to the fact that he wasn't allowed to throw a harpsichord at people or ask somebody else to do it for him anymore, and if there was a constant in this world, it was that Roderich was a useless sissy when he was alone.

And there was the way he rolled his eyes that made it more fun to poke at his cheeks.

More time passed and the few shirts he had turned into a cabinet, the cellar turned into a semi-permanent guest room with its own computer and plastic models of Friedrich the Great. Roderich seldom ventured in there unless it was time for dessert or if he was going to play a piano piece that he knew Gilbert particularly liked, if only to keep him tolerable company. The Austrian himself wasn't the most pleasant landlord, but on one hand he didn't ask for any help with the electricity bills or the various fees for neighborhood repair needed every time Gilbert decided to go out drinking. To compensate, Gilbert often sneaked out of the house in the wee hours of sunrise and put a good chunk of his weekly allowance into the mail, which were usually addressed to one of Austria's various charity agencies. He wouldn't be caught dead helping out, but he might as well do something in return. Just the idea that he might owe something to the priss left a bad taste in his mouth.

'You should come home more often, Brother,' Ludwig told him over Skype. 'You're out bothering Roderich all the time. It's not proper, and I don't know when he's going to pull the extradition card on you.'

Gilbert snorted. Roderich extraditing him, really? Pshaw. 'If he could do that sort of thing, he would've done it hundreds of years ago. Trust me, I know what I'm doing.'

There was a moment of frustrated silence that said, _But you don't know how the world works anymore, Brother, I just want to take care of you while you're still here._ It sent a bitter taste into his mouth, and he resorted to getting rid of it by posting pictures of Roderich sleeping on a pile of fluffy giant panda dolls.

Elizaveta hit him with her pan and asked for the master files a few days later.

Against all reason, the sense of comfort in Roderich's house seemed to extend to when he was sick---it was beyond him how he managed to get sick without an economy, but he did---and Gilbert had lost count of the times he purposely kept the whole thing from his brother and just stretched out on Roderich's sofa, trying to curse away his fever. He went home once or twice, but somehow there was a sense, this sense that he belonged right there, and it was where some old root of his still managed to dig into deeper soil.

In those times Roderich never fussed over him. He usually asked him a few questions, like how he was feeling, which place hurt exactly, and how bad he thought it was. Then he'd leave for a few days. There was always enough food in the refrigerator and everything he needed would be right where he wanted them, somehow, so he never lacked for human creature comforts. The musician would even leave a few CDs of his favourite marches around on the couch, and he wouldn't even mind if he found a Rammstein in the CD player long after Gilbert had fallen asleep. And somehow, even if he went to bed at the peak of his fever, the sound of Roderich's footsteps in the hall was always a sign that he was about to recover.

Sometimes he thought that he really must have hated the Austrian with a fire hotter than a thousand suns, because springing back to health the moment he heard somebody's footsteps? That sort of thing only happens when you're trying to face Darth Vader.

And if he ended up making donations around Austrian hospitals and helping out with volunteer programs? It was because he thought it might be helpful for further bouts of illnesses and not because he suddenly felt like he understood what it was like to be ill and waiting for death or anything.

Gilbert just was never sure what to feel when he saw Roderich's face the mornings after he recovered. Roddy wasn't supposed to smile when his life was going well, he was supposed to give him a mildly disgusted look, like he was seeing some sort of fungal mold that wouldn't go away. He wasn't supposed to coincidentally have Gilbert's favourite dishes for breakfast, and when he invited Elizaveta by for dinner she wasn't supposed to bring tarts and chocolates and flowers and other things which might be misconstrued as get-well presents.

It was sort of disconcerting. Strangely enough, however, _this_ kind of disconcerting was not as uncomfortable as the rest of the 21st century was proving to be.

'If you would like a breath of fresh air,' Roderich would sometimes say, his face perfectly straight, 'perhaps you would like to accompany me for a short stroll around the park?'

And on those dinners it would be all he could do not to drop his fork before he could grin and answer, 'Just admit you won't make it back here on your own, sissy.'

Even that sort of thing, which a long time ago would've been the most laughable thing in the universe, had turned into something warm and malleable. Something he could re-forge into a little melting putty that _belonged._ Like the increasing number of shirts he kept in Roddy's basement, his regular (indeed, routine) work at the hospitals, his evening strolls, the Austrian driver's license that he proudly brandished one day just to show Roderich that he could do it, too.

If being hated long enough could do this to a person, everybody should hate everybody else a lot more. It was nice. It was like floating in a sunny pool, his brains and thoughts buoyed by the gentle notes of Roderich's music. Perhaps that was why he did it, why he rested his head on the Austrian's shoulder one evening and stayed like that. He could hear Roderich's breath catch, but the musician didn't push him off nor try to get away. All Roderich did was prying the TV remote from his hand and switching the channel to something Gilbert found utterly boring, like the local orchestra playing some symphony that didn't hold a candle to his daily dose of piano.

Gilbert didn't move, and neither did Roddy. They stayed that way through the rest of the evening. And the next evening. And the next.

That was when Gilbert thought he should say it, because it was beginning to bother him, and he didn't derive a joy from thinking it wouldn't bother Roderich anymore.

So he said, "You know, Roddy, I wouldn't mind it if you'd scatter my ashes around in Vienna. If I have any ashes to speak of, anyway."

What he meant to say by that was, he didn't mind staying there for good, in one form or another.

The musician turned back to look at him with a rather rude and disbelieving glance, considering they were checking some old tiles at the Stephansdom for the archaeology folks. He was talking about serious matters and even picked the the sissy's precious Hapsburg crypts for it, geez, you'd think the man could at least take him seriously.

He would admit to being surprised, though, when Roderich finally opened his mouth and out came the words, "Do you think so little of me, you fool?"

What the hell was that?

"What, you're too good for me now?" he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "So very typical of the ever classy Austria. What, I don't even have a landmark to my name anymore and I'm still too awful for your precious soil?"

Roderich's eyes immediately flicked to something somewhere outside the building, and he muttered something under his breath. Probably not very complimentary, but there was hardly a thing he could say that would make it sound worse. Not that Gilbert himself was helping. He regretted ever thinking that he could say that sort of thing just because he hated him and Roddy hated him back, what was he expecting? Why did he ever think he even _should_ , anyway?

But then the brunette grabbed his hand.

"Follow me," he said.

"Hey---hey, wait a second, Roddy. Where the hell do you think you're going?" Gilbert yelped, stumbling on his toes. Roddy didn't answer and just kept walking out of the church in a manner that brooked no questions. In older times this would've been a travesty for Gilbert, but he wasn't a nation now, he could hardly dig his heels in and resist even if he wanted to.

It was an ordinary day in the Stephansplatz. He always liked the place, it was old and he remembered praying here quite a few times in the past. Everything somehow remained nice and pretty despite how the pilgrims had turned into tourists with digital cameras and smartphones, there was something that he liked about it, something like sinking into a bathtub of his own after a long dry day. They were here together pretty often in the past years, though, and he couldn't possibly imagine a reason what the big deal was.

When he was just going to make a quip about it, Roderich rounded a corner that he never rounded before, then rounded several other corners. Somehow Gilbert couldn't help but blink. It wasn't like he had never around been here before even if he didn't knew where they were going exactly, but there was this sense he'd never felt in his previous trips, this sense of something approaching. Something powerful and old and familiar and more _right_ than anything a landless nation had any right to feel.

"Specs----"

"I don't come here often because I thought you'd find it in bad taste," the brunette breathed. His face was a giant scowl. "But I never knew you were going to be this obtuse. _Mein Gott_ , Gilbert. I never _knew._ "

 _Never knew what_ , he was about to mouth, but something else stopped him this time. Something completely arresting that came like a hit to the head with a sledgehammer, and yet the same time felt so proud and sweet and so full of joy.

It was a church. An old church, but just about any church around this area was old. The point was that Gilbert knew it. He knew, loved it, joked about its totally ironic name, called it something else and finally after a while he hated it. The church that stood before him now like a beacon of something long lost and found, its windows opening like arms calling to him and saying, _welcome home_. And there was something in his chest that he knew immediately. It, too, was an old thing, one he thought to no longer _be_ , but there it was. Shining and beating all the same.

" _Mine_ ," Gilbert croaked. It really was all he could do.

 _Deutschordenskirche_. The house of St. Elisabeth of Hungary. The memory of a boy, clad in the black-and-white of a priest, swearing to uphold the laws of God forever, to love and to protect and to guard the soul of his German flock in strange lands. That boy who looked at the guardian of Vienna, the weirdly wimpy guardian of the East, and thought his eyes were quite pretty. That boy died a long time ago. But here, Gilbert could feel his chainmailed hand tugging his fingers, the ghost of his voice saying, _it really took you a long time to come home._

"I've also had many names, as many as the papers gave me," Roderich said quietly. "March of Austria. Empire. Republic. You and Ludwig called me Ostmark. All the same, I've never lost the first one I had. We never do."

In the corner, too, was the pale pale ghost of a young margraviate, unaccustomed to his new glasses and looking at each stone worriedly. Beyond him he could see the even paler ghosts of a hundred men, walking, joking, praying. Of course he knew what it was. There was no way he wouldn't know.

_His._

Gilbert was so completely frozen, so at a loss, that he didn't notice when Roderich slowly and perhaps even gently led him away from the church doors. They went into a small corner garden where it was nice and calm and there were birds singing from a few trees. He sat Gilbert down onto a bench and stood watching him patiently, waiting for him to recover.

"So what you mean to say is---" he started, finally.

"You never stopped," the musician answered before he could finish the sentence, even though it wasn't a question.

"How _long_ have you known?" The next words came out like a desperate hiss. "How long have you known, while I was there thinking I was going to die---!"

"If you mean the continuing existence of the Teutonic Order? Just about as long as you did, though I may have a better memory. How many Emperors of mine became Grandmasters, do you think? And how many asked me to tell them stories of your glory days?" Roderich sighed. "As for your nature---quite recently, I suppose. I certainly suspected nothing until you fell ill for the first time, and after you started making all those donations and doing the volunteer work I thought you might be adjusting to what the order currently is---"

"Why didn't you tell me before!?" he yelled, leaping up and grabbing the brunette by his collar. "Why didn't you tell me, if you knew!?"

"I thought you knew it already! Why _else_ were you sitting around in my house, then!?"

"Why?" Gilbert faltered. Why else...why else indeed. He _should_ have known why he felt so comfortable in Roderich's house, it should have been as obvious as sunrise. He just never thought about it. Why didn't he? Why did it feel so natural to be there without questioning, filching Roderich's tortes, napping to his piano, watching his TV?

Why?

"Because we hate each other," he mouthed, blankly. "What _else_ could it be?"

The Austrian stared at him for a moment, then slowly shook his head and sank into the bench."Surely," he muttered, "surely, you can't be so dense. Nobody is that dense, even if it's you."

"Who're you calling dense? _You're_ the one who's dense, I…"

"If I hated you, Gilbert Beilschmidt, I would've kicked you out on the first day and lobbied the government to abolish your order. You would be dead and I would be a much happier man. It should be so obvious, if only you were capable of employing your brains."

"Then what the hell was it!?"

"Figure it out yourself, you fool!"

Gilbert opened his mouth, about to shoot back a retort, but the look on Roderich's face made him stop.

Since when had Roddy ever looked like that?

The Roderich he knew...the _only_ Roderich he ever knew...had a face that never really changed, even if he was angry. He always looked passive, so infuriatingly passive, so ridiculously unaffected by anything the world does that he couldn't help but want to tear it down and watch it crumble back in the same hatred that Gilbert felt for him. Always the unreachable aristocrat always always always, even if his own knight declared war on him, even if his family left him, even if he was reduced to a fraction of what he once was.

Had he ever seen him like this before?

"Can I ask you a favor?" he said, quietly. His mind had gone deathly still; this question seemed like the only one that mattered.

Roderich stared, then after a moment nodded hesitantly.

Gilbert nodded back and, never taking his eyes off the Austrian's face, moved closer. He could feel the brunette flinching, but _he_ didn't move away, either, not even when Gilbert reached up with both of his hands and grabbed his shoulders, as gently and awkwardly as a skittish horse that has never touched a person before.

Still, he was watching Roderich's eyes, and he could see the light in it quivering even if Roderich himself did not move at all.

"Gilbert, what are you---"

"Shut up," he said. "Shut up and just let me _look_ at you."

It was strange, this closeness. It was strange, this permission. It was strange, it was as if he had never seen the Austrian before, as if this was a face he had seen for the first time. And maybe it was. His thoughts raced back through all the Roderich's he had seen in their thousand years, trying to recall if he had ever seen the way he looked right now, through all the bad times and the worst, the times when he thought he wanted to kill the brunette once and for all, the faces he remembered him making.  
  
He remembered more than he thought he would.  
  
He remembered the way Roderich's mouth would curve up slightly into a ghost of a smile whenever Gilbert dragged him out drinking with Ludwig. The way he always seemed lost in his own world, in a mysterious happiness, when he heard a stray tune of Mozart's. The way his mouth curled in irritation back when they still met yearly in Vienna for their chess matches and arguments on the true future of German philosophy. The way his eyebrows knitted together and his eyes burned when he lost Silesia, even though he had never been as frustrated as Gilbert had hoped. He remembered the Seven Year's War and Roderich's grim, determined eyes. He remembered how tired Roderich had looked when they all went behind the Iron Curtain, and how he kept glancing back at Elizaveta and Gilbert when he walked out, only a short while after. And he remembered, a long, long time ago, a margraviate's curious little smile when a ridiculously unwashed young knight asked him what songs his harpsichord could play.

It was strange. He never realized how many faces of Roderich's he had seen. He never realized how many he remembered, or how he remembered them as clearly as if all those memories had just been yesterday. How, despite the faces they showed each other, he could not remember a single face of hatred.

But if Roderich didn't hate him, then what was it?

But if he hated Roderich, why did he always keep looking, why did he remember so much?

"No way," he croaked. "That's the most idiotic answer I've ever heard."

"Gilbert...?"

The quaint southern accent in that voice, in Roderich's voice, brought him out of his thoughts for the first time, and he couldn't help but stare at that face in wonder. Did Roddy really look like that? Did he really look so soft, so worried, so unsure? It was as if he had never seen this before except, perhaps, in a young boy long ago who was wrecked with nervousness at his first meeting with his Teutonic Knight.

So it was true that the world you see could change on a turn of a dime.

Gilbert took his hands off the musician's shoulders, raised them up to his face and touched his cheeks. It was soft and new and strange, even if he had poked them for his own amusement so often, and he couldn't help but want to trace the contours of Roderich's face as softly and slowly as he could. The lines on his skin. The shape of his jaw. The strands of chocolate-colored hair hanging from his brows. He wanted to touch it, to feel it, to prove that it was true if nothing else. He felt like a ship searching for a place to anchor, and he had no idea what he would do if Roderich shied away like he often did.

Roderich didn't shy away. So there his hands remained, following, almost caressing the lines of his face. Their eyes were locked onto each other's, which in itself was strange, and after a time Gilbert himself had to look away.

For several long moments, all that existed between them was silence.

"If you must know," Roderich said, finally, fidgeting a little. "On my end, you aren't quite so far off the mark."

Gilbert's eyes widened, and he turned back to look at the Austrian's violet eyes.

They were not wavering.

It was all he could do to keep himself to staring, looking away and staring again. He didn't know what to say or do with this new information about very old things, and it made him quite unsure as to what he wanted. And so he remained silent for a while. Roderich did not disturb him.

Then finally, he coughed.

"In the absence of contrary evidence, I guess I'll hold you to your words," he said, embarrassed and wondering how the hell his voice had managed to become so _sheepish_. "And on my end, I----oh dammit, Roddy. It's not like I'm against this turn of events, but with all this I'm going to miss you hating me more than a hip-hop band. It's...what'd you call it, the bread and butter of our relationship?"

"I'll hate you again tomorrow," Roderich said, a reassuring hand floating hesitantly somewhere near _his_ cheeks, just close enough to almost touch.

 _Tomorrow_. Such a small and ordinary word.

"Then I guess I'll love you again the day after," Gilbert answered. Then he grabbed the musician's hand and pulled him into a hug that must have contained the entire force of his being.

After the briefest of hesitations, Roderich slowly raised his own hands and gently wrapped them around Gilbert's back, easing his weight into Gilbert's arms. The weight of his years and the words he never thought to exist, maybe. The weight of relief and awkwardness and embarrassment, perhaps. It was certainly an awkward hug, not because they had just realized something important---that something had always been there, after all---but because this was a new way of showing what it was. A new name to call it. A name Gilbert was not used to at all.

It's a wonderful thing, being loved. He didn't know how he could live without it.

"Roddy."

"Mmm?"

"Can I ask you something? It's been on my mind for some time."

"Of course. What is it?"

"About that treaty-thing that said you're not supposed to get cozy with any country---so you were lying all along?"

He wouldn't put it past Roderich. The mild-mannered musician, regardless of how useless he was in battle, was a shrewd old hand at treaties. But then, Roderich only smiled, gently _gently_ smiled.

"Am I in a relationship with any country, _Deutschritterorden_?"

Gilbert stared at him. And he, too, smiled.

"I guess not. Pity Francis' boss went through all that trouble making sure 'you' won't get hitched and 'I' won't rise again, huh?"

Roderich laughed and pulled Gilbert into a long, long kiss.

The trees were full of birds chirping. There was Gilbird, but there was also something else soaring in the sky, far far above the rest of Vienna. The two-headed black eagle was long gone, but he could see a pair of the one-headed variety out there, a pair of new, completely ordinary black eagles. Their cries were different and less dignified, but somehow they rang just as true.

_You can only hide behind paper words and excuses for so long._

"Yeah," Gilbert muttered, breathing in the scent of Roderich's hair. "Yeah, I know."

**Author's Note:**

> As this was originally a fill from the Hetalia Kink Meme, I thought I should clarify a few things that would've been obvious if you could read the original request. In the context of this fic, Prussia never really became a country in the sense of, say, France. He assumed the mantle of one, yes, and he was 99% similar to one, but he never stopped being what he was at heart : the Teutonic Knights. He wouldn't necessarily realize this because the Knights were practically exiled from Germany (what could be called Germany at the time, at least) to Austria quite a few centuries earlier, an event which frustrated him and caused him to block it out almost entirely after he started becoming 'Prussia'. While they're mostly stripped of their arms and military stylings, except for one offshoot in Germany, the Knights still retain their treasures and their histories, and now exist as a charity organization in Austria, Germany and a few other places. Well. Not really. It's a Christian order devoted to taking care of Germans in foreign lands and improving German relations with foreign countries, which both celebrates and de-fanged what the Teutonic Knights originally stood for. The main Headquarters is situated in Vienna. Several later Grandmasters were Hapsburg Emperors, and to this day the Grandmaster position is still mostly Austrian. While writing this fic, I just thought that there's no way something would last that long if Austria isn't at least a bit tsundere for it.
> 
> Also interesting tidbit that I'd like to use but can't figure out where to stick it in except as allusions : the house the Grandmaster's office is currently in, the Deutschordenshaus, used to belong to Mozart at one point. And Brahms. I see what you're doing there, Austria! And while the order was kicked out of Austria during WWII, they went to Italy, which gave them refuge until the war was over and they could return to Austria. (I can see why you have that crush on Italy now, Prussia...)
> 
> I should also mention that the relatively elite Vienna 1st Jagerbattalion still uses nicknames derived from the Teutonic Knights, specifically 'Deutschmeister' for the medieval rank of Magister Germaniae. Although they're technically unrelated. Clearly Austria is dropping hints everywhere at this point, dammit, even if Prussia is likely to find the very idea of Austrian soldiers to be sissies.
> 
> As for why Gilbert always recovers from his illnesses whenever Roderich returns, it's because he's sick due to the Teutonic Order running low on budget. Having realized what Gilbert is, Roderich leaves to make donations and otherwise ask his boss to adjust the yearly audit for non-profit organizations, which results in Gilbert recovering by the time he gets back.


End file.
